Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

My mom reminded me today of how my grandpa, the farmer, used to say that the robin needs to be snowed on three times before spring will come.

Apparently they have been now. My mom is impatient for spring so I hope she gets it soon.

One of the things we ask of baseball is, not to dissociate us from the real world or spare us from it, but to give us a break from the otherwise unrelenting awareness of the gap between how the world is and how we want it to be.

So begins what is possibly my favorite piece of baseball writing this year.

Like a lot of us probably, I've been ruminating a lot lately -- as the U.S. election nears, as the days grow darker and colder, as big and small stresses loom -- on the gap between how the world is and how I want it to be.

Baseball is never worse, though, than when it's shoving that gap right into our faces, making it even more stark and obvious and excruciating than it is while we navigate the rest of our day. Right now, Twins baseball is baseball at its very worst.

So in March I said, about cancelling my autorenewal on the MLB TV subscription, "I'm sure I'll go back to it. I don't think a year without watching or listening to baseball will do my (currently already shitty) mental health any good. But I just need to have a lot of feelings first." But after a half-hearted attempt in May had met with the slightest resistance, I never even regretted it again.

It wasn't quite the dreary year of MLB that I'd predicted -- I worried about the superteams, the boringest kind of teams, coming back in the Dodgers and the Yankees, and while the Yankees were certainly way less fun than last year (when they were briefly below .500 for the first time this millennium and their fans acted like the world was ending), the Dodgers are continuing their inability to keep pitchers healthy and there will be no 100-win teams this season. Of course I'd like to think that with no team winning that many, there's no team that needs to lose that many either -- but the poor White Sox had to show me how far from true that is by being literally the worst team in anything we'd recognize as baseball as she is played today. (That they lost to the Tigers, who went from having barely-more-likelihood of going to the playoffs than those pale hose a month ago, to clinching on that night they beat the White Sox for that record number of losses, is a hell of a thing; it's wild having the Twins be the most boring team in the AL Central this year!).

If that last paragraph didn't make any sense to you, don't worry. The tl;dr is that I ended up feeling pretty justified in saving $150 on not paying for a depressing subscription I wouldn't have gotten much use out of.

Hey I was just showing solidarity with the Twins fans in Minnesota who also couldn't watch the games on TV! That was another really dreary part of this baseball season. The most recent episode of Twins podcast Gleeman and the Geek that I listened to this morning featured the eponymous host saying that they'd had a lot of e-mails from people telling them that this podcast was the only way they'd followed the Twins all year, and I am, no exaggeration, among those. And actually that's felt okay, that has been enough.

Back to the perfect baseball article:

In a way, the Twins are already in the playoffs. You can rebel against the impulse toward despair and rage and resentment, if you want, and embrace the fact that everything we really want out of the postseason is already coming to Target Field over the next few days--at bargain-basement prices, to boot.

What makes the playoffs worth pursuing? Why are they the objective of every fan base and every player? ...It's the raising of the stakes of the game that changes it. It's the brightness of the lights and the national attention and the desperation that makes its way onto the field.... Everything matters. In life, hardly anything feels better than knowing you're doing or witnessing something authentically important, and whereas regular-season baseball is always of negotiable importance, the playoffs matter.

All that vividity and nerve-jangling danger is here. The Twins are a daily story everywhere that baseball is discussed, and they'll play on national TV this Saturday against the Orioles. All that's missing is the bunting on the railings.

(This is where my heart breaks, because this was written on Wednesday and this is Saturday and the Twins already lost that first game against the Orioles which means they are officially out of playoff contention. That takes all the sparkle out of the weekend's games, I probably wouldn't watch them if I could, because it's like watching the last month of Obama being president: our guy(s) can't do much and things are only going to get worse from here.)

But the point still stands! What makes the playoffs fun is that they're meaningful, tense, higher-stakes and widely witnessed. I think this phenomenon will be if anything more familiar to my friends who are soccer-football fans, of teams in leagues that have promotion and relegation. Because people don't just talk about and care about who wins; there is due concern given to the bottom of the league table in a way they wouldn't without relegation.

Last winter, Netflix announced they were doing a documentary following the Boston Red Sox during this season, and hosts of the MLB podcast I listen to were a little bit scornful of this: the Red Sox aren't even that good! Whereas I was intrigued and -- they've had an interesting year, just missing the postseason themselves but even if they hadn't -- I'm more likely to watch that than about, I dunno, the Dodgers season this year.

Success gives worse advice than failure because success doesn't know what worked and doesn't have to think about it that much. Maybe another way of saying this is that happy teams are alike -- (almost) everything is gong like it should! -- but each unhappy team is unhappy in its own way. I can't wait to hear about how the Red Sox are unhappy because I do not know!

Back to the article, which does such a great job of articulating who I think is most at fault with the Twins' 2024 season.

The Pohlad family [owners of the Minnesota Twins] has so methodically demoralized their customer base, there's one other vital, joyous ingredient of playoff baseball missing: the crowd.... In the world I want, we could all melt together into this moment, and Target Field [their home ballpark in Minneapolis] would be full all week, because the Twins have earned this quintet of de facto playoff games--for worse, with this month-plus of harrowing collapse, but also for better, with a summer of tremendous baseball.

The untouchable, disinterested owners of the team have set up everyone below them in the chain of command to fail, and as a result, watching even this quasi-playoff week of baseball isn't off to a fun start. In the world I want, the Pohlads would realize that this is all their fault and try hard to ameliorate the problem in the future. In the world we have, a lot of irrevocable damage is already done, and the mountainous beds of money on which that family luxuriates make them partially unaware of and wholly indifferent to the ways they're making the world worse--including this way.

The list of MLB owners who need to sell their teams into public ownership may encompass all of them if you ask me, but there's no doubt that first on that list is John Fisher who has ripped a team away from Oakland to an uncertain future and no fixed address just because he, inheritor of the Gap fortune, thinks his underpants-gnome level plan will make him some more money.

This has been known and remarked upon for the years that Fisher has been indicating that he doesn't care about Oakland and was happy to move the team even with no idea about what that move would actually entail. So for a long time now, people have been reading him for filth. I'm still thinking about something Joe Sheehan said most of a year ago:

The thing about great wealth is that it allows you to define your own life. The destitute, the poor, the great mass in the middle, even people of moderate or considerable success are all, to one degree or another, dependent upon others. I’ve made a nice little career, and the list of people to whom I’m indebted runs deep into three figures. I’ve been knocked around by industry trends and bad luck and outright malice. I have not had complete control, and I doubt very many of you reading this have, either.

The wealthy, though, the .01%, they can chart their path as they wish, their deep reserves serving as both a battering ram to success and a cushion against failure.

As the final season at the Oakland Coliseum drew to a close this Thursday afternoon (note that the writer starts one paragraph: Thursday felt like a playoff game at 1.5x strength; it's not the standings that make a playoff game, it's the vibe!), if MLB fans have learned anything from Oakland in the past few years, it's that owners add nothing to a team and the teams belong to their fans and their cities (or in the case of the Twins a 4- or 5-state area that falls in to the gravity well of Minneapolis/St. Paul) and we deserve better.

I am fascinated by the Tim Walz memes.

Particularly what they say about masculinity, and whiteness.

I've been thinking about masculinity a lot lately because it's come up among the transmascs in my online circles: can anyone define masculinity in a way that isn't just "being a good person regardless of gender"? Not in our extremely queer and neurodivergent context, apparently. But elsewhere... I forget how different things still are!

I've joined a "wholesome Tim Walz memes" group (which is a whole thing in itself, but) where I saw that photo of the kids hugging him at the school-meal bill signing shared with this quote from John Pavlovitz, who I now learn is a white liberal Christian:

[Americans] are fully fed up with Trump and his surrogate’s contrived John Wayne dudebro American tough guy cosplay, and they are ready to embrace a better kind of manhood: one that doesn’t need to prove how tough it is, doesn’t have to be the center of attention, and most of all, is not concerned about showing its deep humanity because it revels in it.

Pavlovitz makes the good point that Walz's masculinity was directly under attack when the worst his opponents could think to say about him was to mock his provision of menstrual products in school bathrooms by calling him "tampon Tim". It matters that they didn't attack feeding school kids, they didn't even attack him for saying Minnesota is a trans sanctuary state. They went for the icky word:

MAGAs don’t see how much they expose themselves by using a female medical product as a slur, the way it reveals their complete contempt for women and their agendas toward them.

Another article (which I can't even remember now how I found, ha) makes the same point about the conflicting presentations of masculinity here:

The Trump campaign is targeting aggrieved young men by promising to restore their rightful place of authority through oppressive legislation of everyone else. In the MAGA view, the American man has been unjustly torn down and humiliated, and the only way to rectify this is by seeking revenge. But Walz is a living counterexample to their claims. In a time when many American men feel lonely and useless, Walz is presenting an alternative.

I actually don't think that, the last paragraph of the article, does as good a job of describing that alternative as something earlier in the article:

Beyond highlighting the strangeness of the opposition, the meme-ification of Walz seems rooted in a longing for a type of masculinity that’s going extinct in America: the power of a cheerful, useful, helpful, competent, and moral man.

I think that the people talking about "a better kind of manhood" are talking about a kind of white manhood; that the aggrieved young men targeted by the Trump campaign are largely white young men (with the rest encouraged to further whiteness by believing that if they're more racist towards other people it'll somehow elevate them in the eyes of the racists who run almost everything); that the values listed as the "type of masculinity that's going extinct" are describing a type of white masculinity, where "making polite conversation with strangers" is lauded -- regardless of who the strangers are!

Not everyone deserves polite conversation! Prizing civility or "keeping the peace" -- be that at a family gathering or the aftermath of a cop murdering a Black person -- over justice is part of how whiteness furthers its own interests.

I'm torn because I love stuff from the meme group like

I was telling my 15yo daughter about Tim Walz and all the wholesome Big Dad Energy memes going around and showed her a few examples from this page. She says, “Tim Walz drives you to school, and after reminding you to buckle up, says, ‘You ready to rock ‘n roll?’”

and

Tim Walz always does the one-finger farmer wave from the steering wheel.

and

Tim Walz looks like he stays behind after the potluck to put away folding chairs

and of course the Timdr skit, with its Big Dad Energy punchline

But also I'm aware this is a white culture congratulating itself and preening.

But also, we need white people to stop voting for Trump. Everybody else has gotten the memo and it's just us fucking it up, so if this works is it worth it??

(Why yes I do want this t-shirt and I do feel kinda uncomfortable about how Seen it makes me feel!)

I presumed the U.S. Democratic vice presidential candidate had been chosen when I saw #HarrisWaltz2024 in a hashtag and gently corrected the spelling.

I was more sure of it when I saw another toot that said "Up against the Walz motherfuckers."

My first thought then was Man, it's weird to see memes about someone from Mankato...

Mankato is where my parents go to the mall and the movies and chain restaurants.

Okay turns out he's not from Mankato but that's where he worked before he got into office. So that's where I associate him with in his pre-politics life.

To explain my reaction: Tim Walz isn't just a Minnesota guy, he represented the congressional district I'm from before he got his current job as governor (so I guess I've been voting for him since 2006!). It's a rural, agricultural district (so full of Trump fans now, of course).

It's not rare for Minnesotans to have some national profile, but I think it's unheard-of for it to be people from my sparsely-populated part of the state.

A friend -- who, perfectly, is in Minnesota and named Pine -- shared an article yesterday about the 20-year history of Pride in Pine City, population 3,000, and the surrounding rural area.

Having just made a snide comment earlier that day to a trans friend traveling through what she called "the corn-producing parts of this country," I was properly chagrined because, though she does get looks there and shit can still be real bad, it isn't always and everywhere.

Pine City's 20th pride is in fact celebrating the fifth anniversary of its earlier gay men's group. The Strib article describes this via one of its founding members, Don Quaintance, an 83-year-old navy veteran who

grew up in rural Iowa and lived in Minneapolis in the 1960s before moving to Isanti [this is in east central Minnesota]. After his partner died in 1997, Quaintance began volunteering with the Rural AIDS Action Network. That led him and four friends to found a support and community group for gay men in the area, called East Central Minnesota Men's Circle. They began meeting in 2000, often gathering at Tobies restaurant in Hinckley.

I would love to talk to Don. There's a photo of five older white men, who I don't know but who I feel like I do. I know the coffee cups and napkin dispensers in this Hinckley restaurant, I know the kinds of department stores their clothes will have come from. And yet they're gay! And they're all older than me! Intellectually I know that We're Everywhere but seeing this photo still has a big emotional impact on me.

I have heard a lot about AIDS advocacy but in New York and similar cities. I'm just now hearing about the Rural AIDS Action Network, which still exists and still is explicitly helping Minnesotans outside the Twin Cities metro area.

Anyway, after five years, the group wanted to celebrate having lasted that long, so they planned a picnic in a park -- a suitably subdued celebration for a group that has to call itself a Men's Circle.

The men's circle founders worked to put it all together, creating a flyer to distribute in the five-county area that read: "This invitation goes out to all GLBT people in the community. PFLAG, Rainbow families as well as friends and family. Be proud of who you are!"

"Randy [Olson] supplied most of the food: Hamburgers, hot dogs, potato salad and some bars."

The language is a time capsule -- yes, it was "GLBT" when I went to college and even when I first moved to the UK, when that was a shibboleth for telling USian queer stuff from UK queer stuff which was already "LGBT"; and you don't hear about "PFLAG" as a kind of person any more now that, hopefully, it's more expected that people have family who are queer (and maybe something other than Lesbians And Gays" which is of course the second half of that acronym) -- and also so Minnesotan: of course the food was organized by someone called Randy Olson, of course it was hamburgers, hot dogs, potato salad and bars. Sentences like this are so evocative of my upbringing, and the accident of me having moved away from Minnesota just as I started to be able to Be Queer mean I sometimes forget they can co-exist: of course you can be queer and bring bars to pride in the park. But it's good for me to be reminded of this.

Other Minnesotan things here:

As the third annual East Central Minnesota Pride approached in 2007, organizers created a flyer reading "It's Okay to be Gay in Pine City" that showed the town's landmark 35-foot wooden voyageur statue "Francois" wearing a hot pink feather boa.

As the state debated same-sex marriage [in 2012], the event flyer featured a voyageur canoe with the words "Just Married" on the side.

In recent years, the local brewery, Three Twenty Brewing Co., created rainbow T-shirts and Froggy's Bar & Grill started hosting post-picnic drag shows.

I normally dislike drag but I want to go see the drag show at Froggy's Bar & Grill so bad now.

And then at the end, a thing that made me cry:

When East Central Minnesota Pride's giant banner first hung above Main Street in 2015, the planning committee got an e-mail from a closeted teenager who was visiting grandparents in the area.

"I just wanted to say thank you," the kid wrote. "On behalf of so many closeted teens, the downtown banner is so epic and eye catching, we drive underneath it all the time, and I can't help but grin."

I wasn't even a closeted kid because I didn't know enough to be but I still feel for that kid. It was really moving for me to read the article's quick history of Minnesota Prides:

A few other Minnesota cities created events in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including Rochester in 1998 and Mankato in 2002...The idea of rural Prides, however, has taken off in recent years. A former Pine City resident started Lake Pepin Pride in tiny Stockholm, Wis., in 2021, and there now are Pride events in Minnesota towns including Fergus Falls, Virginia and Marshall.

Except for Stockholm (I think I've seen other parts of Lake Pepin, though), those are all towns I've been to. Some fleetingly, some frequently, but I can picture them all and I can imagine the effect it might have had on me if there had been these pride festivals when I was there: when I was a bored kid being dragged around the mall, when I was a terrified kid being subjected to the Mayo Clinic, when I was a college kid who went on road trips to Fergus Falls (I think that was when J got a flat tire?? so many adventures), when I visited a college friend near Virginia on the Iron Range...

I really want to go to a rural Minnesotan Pride now.

The questions here sometimes feel random and sometimes aren't very relevant to me (how many one-night stands, bless; that feels like such a fossil of the height-of-LJ days when I first encountered this meme), but I do like it as a way to think a bit differently than I normally do about my life, and some things that had a big impact on me (like what a dog-hospital year it was for Gary) barely show up here. I do find myself at random points through the year noting things I do that I haven't done before, or wondering what my musical discovery might be, or whatever.

So here we go for 2023.

1. What did you do in 2023 that you'd never done before?:
Was on live national TV. Added testosterone to my body. Broke my ankle. Had an operation.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?:
At the end of 2021, I said about 2022: "if I'm not divorced and on hormones I'm going to be extremely disappointed in myself."

At the end of 2022, I said: "The latter will have to be carried forward until next year at least."

So yeah: I have a diagnosis of gender incongruity and I have pro-boy-otic gel!

( +48 )

I think the tl;dr version of this year is that I did surprisingly well at the seemingly-impossible goals I set myself at the end of last year, getting testosterone is a big win, and my big L is still the lack of friendships and socializing. That feels like an impossible problem to fix, but then just this year I managed to start medical transition, show diffrentcolours around Minnesota, and see my parents twice incluidng to help them move, all of which felt impossible a year ago.

When I first learned, right as the World Series was finishing, that Dick Bremer was no longer going to be doing TV commentary for the Minnesota Twins now that this season had finished, my first thought was oh no, he's got some awful health problem.

I thought this because he's in his 70s. But also because it had never occurred to me that anything short of his death would get him away from that microphone.

To call him an institution seems to put it too mildly. He had just completed his fortieth year doing Twins play-by-play. I can't imagine Twins games sounding like anyone else because he started this when I was one year old. He started in the second year that the Metrodome existed.

By the way he seems fine, health-wise. The truth turns out to be more and less sad: I'm glad he's physically okay, but every impression I've gotten of him is that he's the kind of person who will be sad he didn't quite manage to call 5,000 games (he called 4,972!), that he didn't get a send-off...he might not have wanted a lot of attention but I'm sure he'd have wanted to know when he had gone to his last Spring Training, called his last Opening Day and his last home game in Minneapolis and his last game... Maybe he did know by that last game, but if he did he couldn't tell anyone and that also sounds awful.

I listen to a Twins podcast done by two local (to Minnesota!) sports writers who cover the Twins. I have, once or twice, paid extra to get their bonus episodes on Patreon -- like when Correa signed, it was worth the price of admission for just how giddy John Bonnes sounded -- and when they mentioned having gone into more detail about Bremer there, I signed up again just to hear it.

And it was nice to hear from the only people I'm likely to hear from about how weird it makes me feel to imagine Twins games without him. But it was also surprisingly touching and insightful at the end, thanks again to John Bonnes.

He said:

All of the accolades coming out yesterday are certainly deserved.

I think baseball does lend itself more towards the connection to announcers than any other sport. There is so much space to fill. And that space is often conversational, it's often that with which we connect.

(Gleeman says "Yeah, it's like a feeling of: I'm gonna spend the evening with Dick Bremer and Justin Morneau, watching the Twins."

Bonnes agrees, "Exactly right," and goes on.)

And so, how much of that is rational vs. emotional vs. whatever, something that's ingrained in our DNA, I'm not sure. But finding someone that you want to spend every evening with [laughs] - three hours! - is no easy trick! And over forty years!

Bremer had, not just the discipline and skill to be able to call that, but also showed enough genuine interest in that which you're watching, in the state in which he lived - every small town that was ever mentioned on that broadcast...! And so there's the 'he's one of us' aspect that's going to be really tough to replace. I mean that in a good way, I don't mean that in a cynical way. That's something that any market probably appreciates.

And then on top of that you don't want to spend three hours with somebody that's grating or inauthentic or...is afraid to reveal some of themselves to you. And the part they reveal to you, you admire, or you appreciate, or you tolerate [chuckles] in some cases.

There is, beyond just the skill of announcing, there is a validation of a person's character and personality that goes along with the forty-year run when you've got to talk into a mike for three and a half hours, a hundred and sixty-two times a year! Plus spring training. Plus postseason. Plus everything else!

He has checked all of the boxes. He has an endless amount of energy and enthusiasm for baseball and for this community. And now he's got a lot more time. And I'm interested to see where that gets directed to. I expect it will be in ways that I will admire and also appreciate.

I had never consciously considered it in this way, but I love the idea of baseball commentators having to reveal something of themselves to their audience in order to do their job well.

And there's something about just how much time you spend with them -- I don't watch anywhere near all 162 games in any baseball season (never mind a Twins season, ha! 62 might be a stretch sometimes!) but this had me wondering about the uncountable hours I spent listening to Dick Bremer over my lifetime. Have I spent that much time with any of my partners? Is it only more for my parents? Realizing that he's in that kind of company makes more sense of how affected -- oddly affected, I wanted to say at first, but no -- I was at the news of Bremer's departure.

Today D and I unexpectedly went to the two malls my family most frequented when I was a kid and a teenager. We took some aesthetic photos for mother_bones who shares my fondness for dead malls.

We sent her a few of our photos afterward and I told her

I can see why people get into old malls like this. If you knew them when they were "alive," the dead ones really do feel like ghosts. You remember them so differently it's jarring to see what they're like now.

So much of the more exciting parts of my teenage life were spent in these malls, trudging around behind my parents on their boring errands and trying to get them to buy me things.

One of the things I kept being told in therapy is that I could be sad for my younger self. I guess that had never occurred to me before professionals started telling me so. I didn't figure there was much point to feeling my feelings about past things that I can't affect now in the present. But the malls made me sad for my younger self.

Today I felt so...emotionally claustrophobic in them. Being back and seeing them was a proustian-level full-body memory, not of anything particular I did or thought but just how I felt: when I couldn't go anywhere on my own or buy anything my parents wouldn't see or do anything they didn't know about. The combination of being rural and unable to drive meant I never got beyond that state, which my culture taught me to expect I would transcend as a teenager.

When I did finally rocket myself out of this parental gravity well, it was with such force that I never could revisit my old life here. So it's really strange to be able to do that now, just like it was to see the familiar roads on the drive down from the Cities the other day: I'd never been able before to disconnect that scenery from the experience of being there with my parents and their weird conversations and their strange assumptions and the intense emotions that inevitably are part of my parental visits now.

Almost half my life ago I was already talking about the weirdly huge effect that not being able to drive had on my relationship with my parents, and here I was talking about it in the car with D again today on the way to Mankato.

Dead malls are so evocative for so many people, it's weird I have such an intense relationship with these two. It's weird to grow up rural and disabled.

It was a lot of driving for poor D today. But I'm so glad we did it -- I found it weirdly cathartic! And he's the perfect company for me to do it with.

So much is happening!

Our only daytime plan for today was to go see the Sculpture Garden. I've had a poster of the cherry spoon since like 2007, so it was fun to show the real thing to diffrentcolours. And meet another internet friend there: a haphazard plan ended up working out perfectly!

Along the way we went to a big Target so we could buy some shorts for D and sunscreen for us both. We weren't prepared for this weather! And we had breakfast at an amazing diner: the menus and the coffee cups and everything were Just Right for a diner and my pancakes (of course I got pancakes!) were amazing.

After the Sculpture Garden D wanted to go to Brit's Pub. The British beer they had was very boring so we had nice local beer instead. The rooftop terrace was nice and quiet when we got there but pretty soon started showing Real Madrid v. Chelsea on an enormous screen. The only saving grace of this was that there were like three people actually watching it, so when something happened and I braced myself for a roar from a mob of men, there was a smattering of applause more suited to someone hitting a single in a county cricket match. But I still flinched, every time, expecting the roar. I didn't even know I had that reflex until today when my expectations were thwarted. It felt very weird to realize I actually associate the sounds of televised European soccer/football with a lot of stress and tension in my body -- not my brain, consciously, just my body. Maybe it'll do me some good to keep that in mind in the future.

Anyway the food was good and the server was so nice and enthusiastic that he was the least British thing about the whole experience.

After that we had a much-needed rest back at our hotel and went to meet people from my Mastodon instance. Mine is geographically based, I am a bit of an oddity there and call myself their foreign correspondent. I just joined because I liked the custom emojis, the link to old familiar things I don't otherwise hear much about, and the excellent admin/mods and values of the instance generally.

But I do hear about people giving each other plants, helping fix each other's bikes, having potlucks, and other stuff I am wistful about not being able to join in on. So I definitely wanted to see people while I'm here. We had food and drinks and it was so nice to put faces to names -- including another Erik! That's how you know it's Minnesota.

Two buses went by us without stopping so it took a little while to get back to our hotel but we made it. We are very tired now but we're also very happy with how our time in Minneapolis has gone.

We have to check out tomorrow morning, and get a car and drive to my parents'. The next phase of our trip will begin soon!

It was another of those afternoons where diffrentcolours sits next to me while I work, doing his own stuff on his own computer.

This time, I spent part of it having to chair a meeting (a meeting so stressful both me and my manager were wound up about it! he's always so chill, this was very weird to see...very validating in some ways but very worrying in others: how bad is it if this guy is stressed, you know?).

So D knew he had to just tap my knee excitedly and point out the window to tell me a good dog was walking by. (One of the perks of my work setup is a window that looks out on the road and I can see all the people walking their dogs.)

But later I heard D make the noise. It's sort of an "aww" combined with a delighted gasp. It's very distinctive: it usually means he's seen Gary, or another dog (in real life or a photo), or another cute photo... or if he's like driving or swimming or something he'll explain "I was just thinking about Gary" but he doesn't need to because I so strongly associate the noise with that.

This time Gary wasn't around, and there wasn't a cute dog outside and when I snuck a peek over at him he was looking at his computer monitor.

But it didn't have a dog photo on it...or any other cute animal, or any kind of photo at all. It looked like a map.

I know my beloved is a Map Guy. He does love maps! But I'd never heard even him make the Good Dog Noise at a map before.

I spent the rest of the meeting with this in the back of my head. Probably twenty minutes.

Maybe it wasn't a map. I hadn't looked long or closely. What could have happened here?

When I finished the meeting (it went fine! phew!), D explained.

He'd been looking at something else and accidentally reminded himself of the skyway.

A public-realm infrastructure nerd like him has of course been interested in the Skyway as long as he's known about it, but that was so detached from any thought that he'd ever see it...and the trip planning now has been so focused on covid mitigation and a hotel and car rental and public transport and getting phone data and practical stuff like that, it hadn't occurred to either of us to think about the Skyway.

But of course it connects to a lot of the downtown hotels, including the one we fairly randomly chose. It connects to a lot of the places we're going. We could walk through it to Target Field! We'll have to, to get to the T-mobile store!

That's what made him make the noise.

I'm so delighted for him.